Kovac ignored it because at the same time that voice was grumbling, his adrenal glands were pumping out a rush of intoxicating fuel to keep him focused and moving forward. This was his purpose in life. This was his calling: a case with a sense of urgency attached. In that he was like a hound on a scent. Tunnel vision shut out the extraneous world. The wheels in his head spun like the workings of a Swiss watch.

He loved what he did. He didn’t love why he had to do it, but he couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

He thought about Tinks and what she had said about changing jobs. He couldn’t imagine doing that. Over his career he had put in time in different departments, but nothing suited him like Homicide.

Eventually he would have to retire, but the idea of that secretly struck fear in him. Like every cop he knew, he bitched about the job and joked around about retiring. He knew to the day how long before he got his thirty years in. But the reality of it was something he didn’t want to face. Most cops he knew took their twenty years and got out. He had already passed that milestone. What would he do with himself when his career was over? He couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to.

He went through his checklist in his head as he parked his car in the structure that had been named for a murdered cop a couple of decades past. He had already sent a young detective to Liska’s house to gather as much information as possible from Penelope Gray’s Facebook page. It made more sense to him to do it there, where they already had access to the page, than to waste time going through the process of setting everything up from scratch in the office.

He wanted as much information as possible about the girl’s Facebook friends—names, contact info, what connected them to Gray. He wanted their posts looked at with an eye for anything angry, violent, disturbing. Had any of them threatened Gray? Were they into anything that might have led to the girl’s death?

He wanted to know who was the liar she had written about in her last Facebook post. The obvious assumption was another kid her own age, a schoolmate, someone in her social circle. But he knew better than to assume. She could have been talking about an adult, a teacher, someone in a position of authority, someone who would have been ruined by a revelation. Had her threat to expose that person been enough to motivate a killer? Possibly.

They needed to talk to the other kids who had been in that group at the Rock & Bowl, find out what exactly had set the girl off that night. They had to get Penelope Gray’s cell phone records ASAP. They had to get her medical records, get the films of her once-broken wrist to Möller at the morgue to see if they would match up with their victim. They would do a DNA test for absolute proof, but DNA tests took time, and time was a luxury they didn’t have.

The CID office was already bustling with the extra detectives Kasselmann had assigned to the case, answering phones, taking down tips, tracking down leads.

Kasselmann appeared in the door of his office, looking like a Wall Street executive in a crisp navy-blue suit, every silver hair on his head perfectly in place. He hailed Kovac like he was taxicab.

“You think this Gray girl is your victim?” he asked, taking his seat behind the desk.

Kovac slouched into a chair. “I think so. There’s too much that matches up. We have to get her old X-rays from her doctor this morning and get them to Möller to compare a healed fracture, but I’d put money on it.”

“Why wasn’t she reported missing?”

“The mother thought she was staying with a friend, and the friend assumed she had gone home. And apparently the girl will up and take off for days at a time, so no one was really alarmed not to hear from her. Then the mother got a couple of text messages supposedly from the girl. She didn’t think she had a reason to be concerned. We’re tracking down the girl’s friends off her Facebook page. And we’ll get her cell phone records this morning.”

“What’s the family situation?”

“Strained. It’s pretty clear the mother finds the daughter a major problem and a disappointment. The girl resents the mom. There was some serious rebellion going on. The father is out of the picture for the most part. Mom is dating a shrink, and the shrink’s daughter and this girl don’t get along. They had an argument at the Rock & Bowl on the night in question. Our girl left the club in a huff and was never seen again.”

“You’re getting a lot of media attention with the AMBER Alert for a girl you think is in cold storage at the morgue.”

Kovac shrugged. “I don’t know for a fact. In the meantime, maybe we stir up someone who saw something. Maybe we locate the girl’s car.”

“I’ll make a statement for the press later this morning,” Kasselmann said. “I’d like the mother to be there. She can make an appeal.”

“I’ll put Elwood on that,” Kovac said. “I want her to come in anyway. We need a more detailed timeline about who was where, when.”

“An added bonus to the AMBER Alert: I think I’ll get the green light from upstairs to add a couple more warm bodies to your team,” Kasselmann said.

“Great. I’ll take them.”

“The state patrol has a chopper in the air. BCA has offered assistance.”

“And I’d like to bring in John Quinn to have a look at the case. See if he thinks this is Doc Holiday’s handiwork.”

Quinn had been one of the FBI’s top profilers, brought in by money and political influence to assess the Cremator murders several years past. He had since retired from the bureau and settled in the Minneapolis suburbs to work in the private sector and raise a family.

“I’ll see what I can do about that,” Kasselmann said.

Kovac pushed to his feet. “You’d better. He’ll be here at nine.”

Ignoring his captain’s mutterings, Kovac left the office and went to the room they had set up as command central for the case. The new photograph of Penelope Gray had been added to the montage on the wall, along with the sketch artist’s rendering. It wasn’t an exact match, but it wasn’t bad considering what he’d had to work from.

Kovac stared at the picture he’d gotten from Brittany Lawler. He had enlarged the photo and cropped the Lawler girl out. The girl her friends called Gray looked at him coyly from over her shoulder. She had been portrayed by people who knew her as an angry girl, but she wasn’t angry in the photo. She looked bright and mischievous. Her dark eyes had a spark in them.

Kovac wondered if she meant to make a statement with the half-shaved head and the piercings. Or was all that a disguise, intended to distract the eye from the essence of her—the sensitive, misunderstood poet? Probably a bit of both.

In the best scenarios, kids that age were a bundle of insecurities. They were children who thought they wanted to be adults but at the same time were afraid to let go of teddy bears and dolls. They thought they wanted to be individuals, yet they clung to their peer group, desperate for acceptance. Penelope Gray looked like the poster girl for contradictions.

Liska and Tippen came into the room, Tippen with a venti iced coffee, wearing a silk necktie with a palm tree painted on it. Liska clutched a cup of coffee to her chest as if hoping to will the caffeine directly into her veins.

“Jesus Christ,” she grumbled, “when are they going to get this fucking furnace situation under control? It’s like the ninth circle of hell in here.”

“I’m starting to like it,” Tippen said. “It’s kind of like visiting my parents in Boca Raton. They set their thermostat at ninth circle of hell.”

Kovac studied his partner as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Jeeze, Tinks, you look like a heroine addict.”

She narrowed her bloodshot eyes. “Thanks. That makes me feel so much better about myself. You need to make a motivational video and sell it on the Internet.”